Land Reform, Henry Rider Haggard, and the Politics of Imperial Settlement, 1900–1920

The Historical Journal (2021), 1–21 doi:10.1017/S0018246X21000613 ARTICLE Land Reform, Henry Rider Haggard, and the Politics of Imperial Settlement, 1900–1920 James Watts Department of History, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK Email: [email protected] Abstract This article considers the links between land reform and emigration through the figure of Henry Rider Haggard and argues that these two issues were deeply intertwined within British politics. Land reform in Britain is often considered as a domestic issue, but imperial campaigners often presented this in terms of the British empire. Haggard campaigned for twenty years for a greater living link to the land in Britain and the empire and believed that this link had profound effects upon English patriotism, character, and health. The imperial frontier had a spirit that improved English character, an idea that Haggard developed in the 1870s and is evident in much of his fiction. Imperial emigration was presented as a patriotic act that aided imperial defence in Australia from Chinese expansion and in South Africa from indigenous opposition. Population was the only way to bolster and defend the empire. Considering his books, speeches, newspaper reviews, and his work for the Royal Colonial Institute, this article argues that British politics and the land between 1900 and 1920 should be considered in an imperial frame. Existing work has neglected the imperial aspect of land reform, and how it was presented by emigration societies, which many imperialists considered an obvious way of dealing with unemployment and increasing urbanization whilst bolstering Greater Britain. During the 1890s, Henry Rider Haggard wished for a more serious great cause than his immensely popular adventure fiction. In his autobiography, The days of my life, written in 1912 but not published until after his death, he derided novel writing as the ‘mere invention of romance upon romance’. Although he defended the effect of his novels, especially in their character-forming exhortations to empire to his death, he discovered instead that his ‘great subject lay to my hand, that of the state of English agriculture and of our rural population’.1 1 Henry Rider Haggard, The days of my life: an autobiography (2 vols., London, 1926), II, p. 131. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.219, on 26 Sep 2021 at 23:52:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X21000613 2 James Watts Haggard’s agricultural writings and his advocacy for empire demonstrate that the campaigns over land reform in Britain should be placed alongside those for imperial emigration, particularly from 1900 to 1920, in order to see the importance of empire in debates over pastoral Britain. Many commen- tators, both imperial and those focused on Britain, saw a close attachment to the land as a crucial component in physical, mental, and racial health. For Haggard, who had investigated the declining state of agriculture at the turn of the twentieth century, the answer in an already ‘full’ England was to settle the surplus population from the towns on the wide rural expanses of Australia and Canada.2 Emigration was presented as a solution for unemployment in Britain. Although Haggard, and his allies, like Lords Brabazon and Curzon, were ever alive to the criticism of weakening the heart of empire, and sending Britons away from hearth and home, the security of Greater Britain was relied upon to reassure sceptics.3 In the Dominions themselves, as Eric Richards notes, Haggard’s status as a novelist meant he was a figure whose ‘influence stretched into Australia’ as well as other settler colonies and Britain.4 The concentration in the ownership of land, coupled with the widening of the franchise, raised the question of the economic potential of the markets of the empire, land ownership and peasant proprietorship for many on both sides of the political divide in the early 1900s.5 Haggard believed that agriculture in Britain was in dire straits and that the government, co-operating on an imperial level, should intervene. But he did not support tariff reform. Instead, the land would be the answer to the poverties and dirt of urbanization. In The poor and the land, a report on the Salvation Army and its land settlements in the United States and Hadleigh, Suffolk, in 1905, the palliative for these and many other troubles is to be found, not in the workhouses or in other State-supported institutions, but upon the land, whether it be the land of Britain or that of her immeasurable Empire, which between them, were our poor ten times as many, could provide for everyone.6 Settlement upon the land was, for Haggard, a solution to overpopulation, imperial defence, and worries about the physical and moral degeneration of racial character that dogged debate in the years after 1900. Debates about racial degeneration were widespread as many in Britain struggled to come to terms 2 Henry Rider Haggard, The after-war settlement & employment of ex-service men in the overseas Dominions: a pamphlet for the Royal Colonial Institute (London, 1916), pp. 50–3. 3 Duncan Bell, The idea of greater Britain: empire and the future of the world order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ, 2007), pp. 46–55. 4 Eric Richards, Destination Australia: migration to Australia since 1901 (Sydney, 2008), pp. 70–4. 5 Paul Readman, Land and nation in England: patriotism, national identity, and the politics of land, 1880– 1914 (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 55–60. 6 Henry Rider Haggard, The poor and the land: being a report on the Salvation Army colonies in the United States and at Hadleigh, England, with scheme of national land settlement and an introduction (London, 1905), pp. xxix–xxx. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.219, on 26 Sep 2021 at 23:52:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X21000613 The Historical Journal 3 with the implications of urbanization and looked to the wide spaces of the empire as a solution. Paul Readman has argued that many land reformers, Liberal, Unionist, and Conservative were predominantly opposed to imperial emigration.7 This is true insofar as campaigners were concerned about the ‘heart of the empire’, but there was a strand of argument which linked emigration with the promotion of life lived upon the land in the empire. ‘Migration was deeply woven into the fabric of British life’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this extended to agricultural Britain.8 Struggles with agricultural poverty had led Joseph Arch and the National Agricultural Union to aid emigration to Canada in the 1870s.9 Emigration to the rural Dominions was a powerful lure given contemporary concerns about the unsanitary nature of cities in Britain and the threat of urban environments to character. Government overseas settlement schemes were prominent in the aftermath of the First World War, but there were also migration schemes for ex-servicemen to Canada before this, as Kent Fedorowich has noted. The concern to increase the population of Australia and Canada, partly for reasons of defence, and partly out of ideologies of a ‘Greater Britain’, were a staple of imperialist arguments about land, its connection to character, and imperial stability, in this period.10 Emigration was ideologically tied to the land, both in Britain and the Dominions, and particularly Canada. The ambivalence about assisted emigration in Canada between 1900 and 1930 strongly favoured emigrants from rural British districts; as Janice Cavell has argued, they were assumed to be more industrious.11 Settlers on farms were assumed to be physically fitter, healthier, harder-working, and more patriotic. Especially given issues of rising unemployment in the cities, the lure of emigration to colonies willing to give land to settlers was strong. Issues of the land and politics in Britain were mired in the campaign for tariff reform in the 1900s. This was a prolonged political debate that had strong imperial aspects. For Joseph Chamberlain in particular, tying the empire together by bonds of interest as well as sentiment and kin was the bedrock of tariff reform. Tariff reform was intended to be a defence of British agriculture; by increasing the cost of foreign competition especially from the USA, British farmers would supposedly be given a considerable boost. But British farmers were no keener to compete with cheap grain from Canada than from the US. As such, there was a tension in imperial interest which 7 Readman, Land and nation, pp. 80–5. 8 Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and globalisation: networks of people, goods and capital in the British world, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 64; Bill Luckin, ‘Revisiting the idea of degeneration in urban Britain 1830–1900’, Urban History, 33 (2006), pp. 234–52. 9 Joseph Arch, The story of his life told by himself (London, 1898), pp. 108–9. 10 Kent Fedorowich, ‘The migration of British ex-servicemen to Canada and the role of the Naval and Military Emigration League, 1899–1914’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, 25 (1992), pp. 75–99; Bell, Idea of greater Britain, pp. 49–55. 11 Janice Cavell, ‘The imperial race and the immigration sieve: the Canadian debate on assisted British migration and empire settlement, 1900–1930’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 34 (2006), p.

Load more